Could Donald Trump Win the General Election?

There is a slim chance that Donald Trump could emerge from the general election as the new President.

Photograph by Luke Sharrett / Bloomberg via Getty

Last night in Palm Beach, Donald Trump’s new sidekick, Chris Christie, introduced the G.O.P. front-runner, who won seven of the twelve state races on Super Tuesday, as the next President. With Trump seemingly marching toward the Republican nomination, it’s a natural prospect to raise. But is it a realistic possibility? In five of the past six elections, Democrats have won the popular vote.* Surely a divisive figure like Trump couldn’t reverse that trend. Or could he?

On Wednesday afternoon, I spoke with Ruy Teixeira, a political scientist who is an expert on changing demographics and elections. Back in 2004, Teixeira and the journalist John Judis published “The Emerging Democratic Majority,” an influential book that highlighted the growing number of minority voters across the country, particularly Hispanics. More recently, toward the end of last year, Teixeira, who is a senior fellow at the Century Foundation and the Center for American Progress, co-authored a paper titled “The Path to 270 in 2016,” which argued that demographics continue to favor the Democrats in assembling a majority in the Electoral College.

In conversation, Teixeira began by reviewing some figures that he and his colleagues have put together. Between 1976 and 2012, the percentage of white voters in the U.S. electorate declined from eighty-nine per cent to seventy-four per cent. In 2016, that number is likely to fall another two per cent, Teixeira said. That means the minority vote will rise from twenty-six per cent to twenty-eight per cent. About half of that increase reflects the growing Hispanic population; the other half is accounted for by rising numbers of Asians and peoples of other ethnicities.

Despite his occasional protestations to the contrary, Trump would be relying heavily on white voters in a general election. Since they still represent close to three-quarters of the electorate, it appears to be mathematically possible for him to win a majority. Potentially, he could win by increasing turnout in predominantly white areas, winning over Reagan Democrats, and bringing in enough new voters to overcome the unfavorable demographic trends facing the G.O.P. Arguing along these lines, some analysts have raised the possibility that Trump could sweep the Rust Belt states of Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, and also flip a Democratic state in the Upper Midwest, either Wisconsin or Minnesota or both. A Trump rampage across the Rust Belt would transform the electoral map—it could even allow him to reach two hundred and seventy votes in the Electoral College without carrying Florida, which is usually a pivotal state. “Don’t laugh,” Zach Carter and Ryan Grim, of the Huffington Post, wrote last month. “Donald Trump could actually win this thing.”

When I put this scenario to Teixeira, he sounded dubious. “It is not crazy,” he said, citing the possibility that Trump could flip some blue states, such as Colorado, New Hampshire, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. “But I think it would be very hard to pull off.”

Teixeira went on to explain that he was skeptical in part because, on a national basis, Trump’s support among white voters isn’t quite as strong as it sometimes appears to be. While he is attracting a lot of people to his rallies and to the Republican voting booths, it is a mistake to believe that these people are wholly representative of that segment of the electorate. “We are talking about the most alienated white non-college voters, and some college-educated voters,” Teixeira said. “The most totally pissed-off ones.” Among white Americans as a whole, including those who vote Republican, Teixeira reminded me, there are many people with moderate or liberal views. And in order to win the election, Texeira went on, Trump would need to rack up huge majorities of the white vote in some parts of the country where that vote has traditionally been relatively liberal, compared to the white vote in the South.

To illustrate his arguments, Teixeira cited some more figures for individual states, distinguishing between white working-class voters who didn’t go to college—Trump’s base—and white college-educated voters. In Ohio in 2012, Mitt Romney won the white working-class vote by a sixteen-per-cent margin: fifty-seven per cent to forty-one per cent. According to Teixeira’s projections, Trump, to carry Ohio in November, would need to increase this margin to twenty-two or twenty-three points. “That’s a big ask,” Teixeira said. And Trump would also need to retain, or even increase, Romney’s ten-point margin among college-educated white Republicans, even though at least some members of this group may be sufficiently put off by Trump’s extremism to stay at home, or even to switch to the Democrats.

In the Upper Midwest, where there is a strong progressive tradition and the labor movement is still relatively feisty, the electoral arithmetic facing Trump is even more challenging. To win Wisconsin, he would need to win the white working-class vote by a margin of somewhere between twelve points and sixteen points, Teixeira said. In 2012, however, these working-class voters split almost equally between Romney, who got fifty per cent of their votes, and President Obama, who got forty-eight per cent.

In Minnesota, the challenge facing Trump would be even greater. In 2012, Obama actually won the white working-class vote there, albeit narrowly; according to figures Teixeira cited, the President got forty-nine per cent in this demographic, while Romney got forty-eight. To carry the state this fall, Trump would have to turn these numbers around and win a sizable majority of white working-class voters—and this despite the fact that in yesterday’s G.O.P. caucus he only managed to come in third.

The existence of a potential upper limit on Trump’s support among white voters isn’t the only reason Teixeira reckons that he would be a long shot for the White House. The biggest weakness in the argument that Trump can win, Teixeira said, is that it rests on the notion that he can raise turnout among such voters, particularly working-class ones, without provoking a similarly high turnout among anti-Trump voters, particularly people of color. He pointed out that while there are large numbers of conservative, working-class white voters in key battleground states like Florida and Virginia, who could provide a fertile support base for Trump, there are also a lot of African-American, Hispanic, and college-educated white voters, who will have noticed the kinds of things he has been saying over the past eight months. “I find it just so implausible that we could have this massive white nativist mobilization without also provoking a big mobilization among minority voters,” Teixeira said. “It is kind of magical thinking that you could do one thing and not have the other.”

After speaking with Teixeira, I felt somewhat reassured. The electoral numbers and demographic trends that his argument rests on are known facts. In the aftermath of the 2012 election, the Republican National Committee commissioned a report that acknowledged many of these facts, and that made the case that the G.O.P. couldn’t expect to win back the White House without doing a better job of appealing to minorities and moderates. Trump’s candidacy represents an angry repudiation of this argument, and an apparent denial of political reality.

On the other side of the ledger, Trump has been trampling on established political wisdom since he launched his campaign. So far, it has worked for him. Later this week, he will visit Macomb County, in suburban Detroit, an area rich in Reagan Democrats that used to be regarded as a bellwether, and where Trump is reportedly doing very well. When I pressed Teixeira, he conceded that the Rust Belt strategy does represent at least a potential path to the White House for Trump. But he described it as “a narrow path” that depends on a number of unlikely events, such as minority voters failing to show up at the polls despite the type of campaign that Trump has conducted. “We could have a high-turnout election, but that doesn’t mean that Trump would win,” Teixeira said. Let’s hope he’s right.